A grim report from the Census Bureau last week put Pike County, given its border on the state line, right in the middle of a mini-emigration trend from both Louisiana and Mississippi.
Mississippi’s population fell by 1,300 people between July 2016 and July of this year. For the same period, Louisiana lost 1,800.
These are not Great Depression changes, when families in the 1930s Dust Bowl headed in droves to places like California. Literally, the recent population losses of the two states amount to a fraction of a fraction of 1 percent.
However, these totals mask the fact that a lot more people are choosing to leave.
In Mississippi, the Census Bureau says 9,800 more people moved out in the past year than moved in. It was the arrival of 2,000 foreign immigrants, along with 6,500 more births than deaths, that got the total population loss down to 1,300.
Louisiana had the same issue: There were 27,500 more departures than arrivals. But the addition of 7,700 immigrants, along with 18,000 more births than deaths, made up for all but 1,800 of the population loss.
For Mississippi, it’s certainly worrisome that the state has lost population for three straight years. If this keeps up much longer, it will be a signal that Mississippi is unable to compete with other states in attracting new residents. That means there will be fewer people here to boost the economy — which is the exact thing that might help convince people to stay put.
Also worrisome is the fact that a lot of college graduates who grew up in Mississippi and earned a degree from one of its universities have gone elsewhere to work. A report to the state College Board last year estimated that only half of the graduates of Mississippi’s eight public universities are working in the state five years after getting their degree.
To some extent this is understandable. Lots of people who grow up in a small town or rural area want to see what a big city is like. It’s just disappointing that only half of our best-educated people choose to stay.
But the biggest concern for both states is how they compare with the neighbors. Alabama’s population is up 14,000 over the past year. Arkansas is up 16,000. Tennessee is up 66,000. Florida is up 327,000. And Texas is up 400,000 — in a single year. Those numbers give a pretty strong indication of where people from Mississippi are moving.
In the past year, Mississippi and Louisiana are the only two Sun Belt states that lost population. They are two of only eight states across the country that lost population. The challenge, then, is how to reverse this trend.
Louisiana, with its New Orleans-Baton Rouge population corridor, probably will be OK in the long run. But Mississippi has few large markets to work with, making the task of statewide improvement more difficult.
Here are a couple of ways to do better — if we can muster a decade’s worth of patience.
The first order of business is to create jobs. The state keeps throwing millions at big companies that may never make the investment worthwhile. How about taking some of that money and instead offering it to smaller Mississippi-owned companies that want to be here and want to grow their business?
Task No. 2 is education. If smarter people are leaving, it stands to reason that the ranks of the less-educated are growing. The only way to change that is education and job training.
We have to get more aggressive with workforce training, and we have to get more creative and demanding with elementary and high school education.
This will be a long road. It may not succeed for decades. But Mississippi has to try. The census figures say it’s time for big changes.
